The Independent (UK)'s Scores

  • Music
Select another publication »
For 2,310 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Middle Of Nowhere
Lowest review score: 0 Donda
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,261 out of 2310
  2. Mixed: 1,019 out of 2310
  3. Negative: 30 out of 2310
2310 music reviews
view
per page
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Semicircle
    For this latest incarnation of The Go! Team, bandleader Ian Parton has doubled down on the street-beat cheerleader mash-up mode of earlier albums like Proof Of Youth by searching out an actual youth choir from Detroit to accompany the marching-band-style brass that drives Semicircle. This works brilliantly on “Mayday”, an anthemic lament for love signals ignored, with the ebullient brass and chanted vocals evoking street parades, and “Semicircle Song”, in which the staccato brass lines interlace like a proper New Orleans marching band.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tenderheart
    The sound here is occasionally brasher--most notably on the gentle opener “Everyone’s Looking For Home”, suddenly overwhelmed by a startling, brash mariachi climax--but generally sticks fairly close to the Laurel Canyon soundalike stylings of Outlaw’s “SoCal” sound.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Remembering Now
    At 14 tracks, Remembering Now has a slight paunchiness to it – something that grates particularly during the drearier slow numbers, such as “The Only Love I Ever Need Is Yours” and “Memories and Visions”.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultra Vivid Lament
    It’s an album that sounds very little like their last, and in that sense – despite its myriad reference points – The Ultra Vivid Lament is a Manic Street Preachers record, through and through.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Four
    Bloc Party's touchstones remain firmly rooted in their indie upbringing.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Strange Mercy
    For her third album as St. Vincent, Annie Clark has jettisoned the baroque string and woodwind arrangements that marked 2009's Actor, in favour of more direct, guitar-based settings.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Architect
    Disregard the didacticism, and there’s much to enjoy in tracks like “Til I’m Done”, a pumping disco-funk assertion of independence with abundant orchestral bells and whistles; the louchely loping “Guilty”, with Paloma giving it the full Amy Winehouse; and the pop-soul charmer “Crybaby”, whose kalimba-style keyboard groove recalls Whitney’s “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay”. But the bombastic tone overall is exhausting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tyron
    The record is divided into two sets. The first half is a jagged-edged electro backed spleen-splurge with all seven tracks titled with the CAPS LOCK ON. The smoother, more soulful second half finds him in more reflective, lower-case mood.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kiss Me Once
    This isn’t a bad collection overall, if less than the expected redesign.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ribbons
    For all its apparent homogeneity, there’s considerable diversity in approach, with the resonant, vibes-like tones and cyclical guitar waves of “Strand” a continent apart from the shadowy, almost Krautrock manner of “Fog March”.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Audio, Video, Disco
    The second album from Franco-techno duo Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé is decidedly less pop-tabulous than their career highlights to date.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Impossible Dream
    The issues she covers are complex at times--“Called You Queen” recounts a problematic period partnering a gay man, “before your body betrayed you”--but “Blue Diamond Falls” closes the album on a positive note, affirming feminist possibilities that “you can be whatever you like”.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Less You Know, The Better
    There's a pronounced shortfall of his usual joyous eclecticism here, with many pieces settling for basic repetitive sequences; some sound like little more than extended intros.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Christmas Album
    Recorded with friends in Conor Oberst’s house, it has a nice, homely ambience which allows the imaginative arrangements to work their understated charm.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lindsey Buckingham
    Drum machine led “Swan Song” is the album’s most inventive and surprising song, proving that the creator of “Tusk” has still got his knack for innovation and creating a daring pop hook. While the weakest tracks here tend to veer into self-pity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Guitar
    The songs are individually worthwhile, but get lost in the aggregate: Guitar rattles through agreeable ditties about life, love, and music at a clip that makes them blur together.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Himalayan
    The chunky robot-rock riff [in the opening track] suggests they’re headed to Queens of the Stone Age territory, a route confirmed by the strutting “Brothers and Sisters”; but each track seems to signal some fresh direction.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hug of Thunder
    For all the broken dreams, what’s impressive about the album is the way that BSS balance tones, textures and themes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Moonfire
    There's plenty to enjoy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Diamond Mine
    The pair have weaved Anderson's songs together with various ambient elements--traffic noise, birdsong, the tinkle of teacups on saucers--to create a song-cycle that illuminates the exceptional in the everyday.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Live Forever (The Stanley Theatre, Pittsburgh PA, 23/09/80)
    Taken from a show in Pittsburgh in September 1980, Live Forever is the last recorded concert by Marley and The Wailers, but while it represents them at the broadest extent of their appeal, it by no means captures the band at their most potent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mellow Waves
    It’s the overall cool/warm Tropicalismo tone that’s most engaging about Mellow Waves, established through the light accretion of sparse piano, percussion, synth and guitar parts supporting his soft vocal on opener “If You’re Here”.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MTV Unplugged [Live]
    An impressive show, but not one likely to persuade doubters.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    American Tunes
    A country-gospel stab at Ellington’s “Come Sunday” badly misses the mark, and Toussaint’s innate funkiness is only lightly felt, sometimes sacrificed for too much tastefulness. There are still many American treasures here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Step 2: A Different Kind of Human
    There’s a focus on tribal percussion and a multitude of vocal techniques you don’t expect on a pop album: folky vocables, angular melodies, overdubbing, a male choir. This is more enthralling on some tracks than others.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Strange Little Birds
    This second album since returning from an absence caused by lack of interest offers nothing new musically, but Manson at full-strength.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Every Valley
    Rather than the optimistic, outward-looking The Race For Space, on Every Valley he tells the grim story of the decline of Welsh coal-mining, from the title-track’s proud proclamations, declaimed in Richard Burton’s Rushmore rock-face of a voice, through to the poignant conclusion of “Take Me Home”, a Welsh Male Voice Choir’s plea to “let me live again”.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johannesburg [EP]
    An enjoyable diversion.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Life & Livin' It
    Compared with his perky previous albums Mars and Mean Love, there’s something underwhelming about this third effort from Ahmad Gallab, aka Sinkane--it feels every bit as pedestrian and dutiful as its title suggests, its slow, methodical grooves pleasantly light but laborious.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love Undercover
    It finds Skelly in more emotive manner than with The Coral.
Page: